College Composition & Communication - Volume 75, Issue 4, 2024

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

This mixed-methods study reveals the underrepresentation of non-tenure-track (NTT) scholars in academic publications in English, even while they teach the majority of courses. Interviews with NTT scholars and editors reveal time, in several dimensions, as a significant barrier to publication. An analysis of interviews with editors and journal websites suggests models for change.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

Drawing from a qualitative study, this article advocates for challenging myths about the traditional graduate student. We discuss how these myths create a sense of unbelonging for graduate students, and we call attention to the exigency for transforming graduate programs to validate and sustain students’ diverse literacies and linguistic resources.

Asao Inoue’s work has dominated antiracist scholarship in writing studies, but is flawed when it comes to the performance of Black students. This essay reviews a large, overlooked body of work on antiracist feedback from educational psychology and suggests ways that this work can inform our own research and practice.